90 
ORIGINAL ARTICLES. 
that of an adolescent female which lived for some time in the 
menagerie of Louis the Fourteenth at Versailles.* It was imported 
from Congo; and we have the expressed or implied authority of 
four most eminent and experienced French comparative anatomists, 
namely, Daubenton, Cuvier, Laurillard, and Blainville, that it had 
only 20 dorsal vertebrae, and 20 pairs of ribs. Perrault, who dissected 
the animal, assigns the same numbers ; and the accurate Daubenton, 
who enumerates the dimensions of all the bones in such minute 
detail, says—“ II y a vingt vertebres dorsales, et vingt cotes de chaque 
cote.”f He assigns the following numbers to the different divisions 
of the column :—7 cervical, 20 dorsal, 3 lumbar, 3 sacral, 31 caudal 
vertebrae, and 20 pairs of ribs, of which 7 true and 13 false. 
Laurillard, as is well known, stood to Cuvier in the same relation of 
aid, as Daubenton did to Buffon, although he never was formally 
recognised as his collaborateur. When Perrault’s skeleton passed 
into their charge, Cuvier could only state the number which they 
saw, and finding the dorsal vertebrae to be the same as in the Indian 
skeletons which he had dissected, namely 20, he naturally assumed 
that to be the normal number in both the living species, as Peter 
Camper did on the same grounds. 
Skeletons of the African Elephant are very scarce in England. 
I know of two only, to be found in public collections : the one of an 
adolescent animal in the museum of Saffron Walden, mounted, and 
therefore less reliable ; the other in the Osteological department of 
the British Museum, not set up, and in the most favourable state for 
examination. It is of a young adult, in which the epiphyses are 
not yet united, imported from the Cape of Good Hope; sex unre¬ 
corded. The bones are still covered with the periosteum and shreds 
of ligament, having not yet undergone the preliminary operation of 
cleaning. The vertebral column is in masses of from three to five 
vertebrae, united by ligaments, while others are free. On three 
different occasions, specially with a view to the present investiga¬ 
tion, has the vertebral column been put together by me, scrupulously 
examining all the surfaces of juncture from the sacrum to the atlas, 
and the following results were yielded: 7 cervical v, 20 dorsal v, 
3 lumbar v, 4 sacral v, 26-30 caudal vertebrae, and 20 pairs of ribs, 
one of the last pair being wanting.* The precise number of the 
caudal vertebrae could not be determined, as the terminal portion of 
them is still imbedded in the tail. But there are at the least 
twenty-six. 
We have thus, two instances, the one South African, and the 
* Perrault, Memoir, pour serv. a l’Hist. cles Animaux, 1734, Part iii. PI. xxiii. 
f Buffon’s £ Hist. Natur.’ 4to tom. xi. p. 113. 
j In order to put the statement beyond question, as resting upon the testimony 
of a single observer, I requested my friend, Mr. W. H. Flower, the able Conservator 
of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, to examine the 
skeleton closely, and he arrived at the same numerical results. 
